


Routine

by frangipani_flowers



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, M/M, barely preslash, basically nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:26:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frangipani_flowers/pseuds/frangipani_flowers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Broken Homes; possibly non-compliant with Foxglove Summer.<br/>Even when Peter isn't trying to experiment, things still don't seem to go according to plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Routine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



> Beta-ed by the lovely NightsMistress. I'm very grateful! :)

When I opened the door to the breakfast room, the smell of bacon hit me like a double decker bus driven by someone who definitely shouldn’t have had a license. We tend to eat closer to the corner of the room, where there’s not so much surrounding surface space, in the hope that it might restrain Molly’s culinary enthusiasm, but even so, breakfast in the Folly is never what you might call restrained in the food department. Even by that standard, Molly had really gone to town today. 

The table was covered with platters of bacon, eggs, black pudding and sausages, and in the spaces were foods that definitely didn’t count as breakfast foods but that were favourites of Molly’s. I spotted steak and kidney pie, and a vast tureen of some sort of meaty-smelling soup, and something down at the far end of the counter that looked like it was probably tripe.

Nightingale looked up from the paper as I walked in.

“Molly’s been busy,” he observed casually, as I stopped to look at the table. The dishes and bowls had been crammed onto almost every inch of the table, excepting a small area around Nightingale’s place so as to give him plenty of room. 

I didn’t bother to say anything about my suspicion that Molly’s burst in activity was specifically aimed for Nightingale’s benefit. I’d normally have grumbled about it to Lesley later - she found Molly’s indifference to me hilarious, which wasn’t exactly helpful but meant she let me complain for a bit before telling me to pull myself together - but that wasn’t really an option any more. I got to work clearing myself a space by Nightingale.

“Anything special happen?” I asked. Nightingale helped me rearrange the dishes by moving some items closer to him. He shook his head slightly.

“I believe Molly has noticed a lack of interest in breakfast lately,” he said. “She seems to be trying to make up for lost time.”

I almost felt bad, but no amount of guilt would have persuaded me to eat pig snout for breakfast all week. I’ve got no problem with eating snout – it crops up every so often in my mum’s cooking – but I’m not so fond of it I want it first thing in the morning. Besides, I wasn’t the one who had suggested breakfasting away from the Folly after the third day.

“What was the call-out for last night?” asked Nightingale. “Anything significant?”

I helped myself to bacon and filled Nightingale in on the events of the previous evening. I’d been called in to have a look at a crime scene for DCI Seawoll in Mayfair around ten-thirty, but it had turned out to be a standard B&E with a bit of light homicide. Horrible, but no weird bollocks, which had been a relief all round. Normally the idea of passing the investigation, along with its accompanying drain on the departmental budget, off onto the Folly would have been an appealing one for the MIT, but not this time.

I’d not been keen on looking at corpses when I could have been practising my fourth declension verbs with a beer anyway, but with the senior officer after my blood I was about as keen to be part of the investigation as I was to skinny-dip in the Thames. Seawoll was still bitter about Lesley’s defection and if he didn’t actually blame us (and especially me) then he was doing a damn good impression of it, though I didn’t tell Nightingale that part. 

Neither me or Nightingale mentioned Lesley. After that first few hours securing the Folly and updating everyone's security status, we had both very carefully avoided the subject entirely. It had been something of an unspoken rule for weeks now, and I hated to interrupt a good thing.

I was pretty sure Nightingale had been thinking about it, though, what with his asking Zach about me and the way he kept flicking glances at me out of the corners of his eyes, which I assumed was him attempting to keep a subtle eye on me. It was a bit weird to be focused on like that during breakfast; I kept catching him watching me over the edge of his teacup. He’d mostly backed off on that by now, though every so often I’d still glance in his direction and find hastily averted eyes or a carefully blank expression. It made me edgy.

Molly glided in, looking as terrifying as usual in her sharply pressed maid’s dress. She came up to the table and carefully placed a red enamelled thermos that looked like it had fallen out of a Famous Five book at Nightingale’s elbow, before vanishing away.

I was going to ask, but Nightingale got there first, draining the last of his tea and standing up from the table.

“Right,” he said. “Time for practice.”

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Nightingale sighed in exasperation. "Peter, this is a difficult _forma_. You need to give it your full concentration if you are ever going to reproduce it successfully."

I was not impressed, but I had another go, just to show willing. I’d been practising _frigus_ , which was supposed to produce a chilling effect, for weeks now. At first, the only change in temperature had been due to the ancient boiler turning itself off, but I’d eventually managed to get to the point where I could semi-reliably produce an area of cool air that I could feel against my skin.

I focused really, really hard on the _forma_ , and produced my cool cloud. I thought it might have been chillier than usual, and Nightingale must have thought so too, as he nodded his approval.

“Much better,” he observed. “Now all you need to do is focus the _forma_ properly. It’s still a little vague at the moment.” 

Nightingale picked up the thermos Molly had left on the table at breakfast, and filled a small beaker with something colourless that steamed. Nightingale caught me looking. “Hot water,” he told me. Not anything especially exciting, then.

Apparently, my new job was to focus _frigus_ on the water and cool it. I supposed it was at least more measurable than doing it on air, and was just about to say so when I saw Nightingale’s grey eyes shift focus from me to the lab doorway behind me. “Ah, Molly. The telephone?” 

I resisted the urge to squeak and spin around in shock. I wasn’t sure I’d ever really get used to Molly’s tendency to move soundlessly, but I damn well wasn’t going to show it. I shifted slightly and shivered a little as Nightingale walked past me and turned in the doorway. 

“Keep that up for another half an hour,” he instructed me, “and I’ll come and see how you’re doing.” He didn’t wait for me to reply, pulling the lab door to behind him as he left. 

“Voldemort,” I mumbled resignedly, reminding myself of Lesley. Then I made the forma in my mind and directed it at the beaker.

\- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

By the time I’d spent about ten minutes chilling warm water, the lack of scientific method was nagging at me again. I put the batteries in the cordless kettle in the corner and boiled myself some more water as I thought. Nightingale hadn’t been able to give me an answer about whether _frigus_ was cooling the area itself or displacing heat energy, and I was still trying to work out a method of testing for that without using electrics. I put that thought aside for now.

There was a very simple way of monitoring the effect of the _forma_ on the water, though. I hunted through the cupboards until I found what I was looking for: a box of thermometers that looked like they should have been retired before I was born. Definitely mercury, then, I thought, and made a mental note to be especially careful with them. Mercury poisoning was definitely not how I wanted to go.

I carried my supplies back to my post, and got to work noting down the difference in temperature of the water in the beaker before and after each performance of the _forma_. An idle part of my brain wondered if I could persuade Nightingale to act as a control so that I could collect some baseline data. I wasn’t especially confident.

It turned out that, if I was really concentrating, I could drop the temperature of the water when it was hot by about fifty degrees, but that as the water got colder, the less effective my _forma_ was. I’d just decided that this probably supported the heat-displacement theory when the door slammed, the shape in my mind slipped and the beaker exploded.

I reflexively threw up my arm to cover my face at the noise and felt a hot stab of pain in the softer bit just below my elbow. Glass shards tinkled to the floor around me in a weirdly musical shrapnel scatter, and skidded across the floor at my feet.

I lowered my arm and stared at my beaker-shaped lump of ice and the shattered glass on the floor. Ice, my brain offered helpfully. Glass fracturing due to the rapid expansion into ice, possibly, though maybe shifting the heat into the glass might have broken it? But perhaps the heat change wouldn’t have been extreme enough, and it was because of the forma I’d misshaped? Though that must have been what froze the water… My thoughts ticked slowly through ideas until they were derailed by the noise of the door opening. I glanced up at Nightingale as he strode quickly in and over to me.

“I heard the glass break. Are you all right?” he asked, eyes intent and focused as he looked me over. “What have you done to yourself this time?”

“I’m fine,” I replied, a little surprised. “Cut myself a bit, I think, but that’s all.” Nightingale followed my gaze to my elbow and winced slightly, but he relaxed a little and looked at me sternly.

“Peter, what have I told you about these variations? This kind of reckless experimentation with non-standard _formae_ could cause you some serious damage.” Despite his tone, Nightingale’s hands were gentle as they steered me to sit down on a lab stool and drew a surprisingly large shard of glass out of my forearm. “Roll up your sleeve.”

“I really am fine,” I protested mildly as Nightingale collected the ancient first-aid box from the side. ”Besides, I wasn’t experimenting. The door shutting distracted me, that’s all. It was just a bit of a surprise and it just… slipped.”

“My point remains, however… hold that there,” said Nightingale, and I shut up and pressed the gauze patch to my arm as he taped it in place. “The point remains, that you need to be more careful. If you get into this much trouble with the basic _formae_ , I dread to think what you could do with a third- or fourth-order spell.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response, so I kept my eyes on his long, graceful fingers as he cut the tape and just made my best vaguely-assenting-but-non-committal noise, hoping that he’d accept that. Nightingale sighed a bit, but didn’t comment on it, which I assumed meant he was giving the conversation up as a bad job. He sat back on his own lab stool, carefully tucking the tape and scissors back into the case and setting it precisely on the counter.

Then he turned and looked at me, and I could still see an edge of concern in his eyes. “Are you all right?”

Having your boss look genuinely worried about you is enough to make any self-respecting copper anxious, and I was just about to say something flippant or ask a question or pretty much anything to change the focus, when it occurred that it might be a slightly bigger question than that.

I hesitated a moment, giving it a moment of thought, and I thought I saw his gaze sharpen and that edge of concern come out a bit further. 

“Good enough,” I said eventually. “I’ll be good as new soon enough.” I could see the moment he decided that we were talking about the same thing, because for a second he looked relieved, then awkward, and then he was strictly business again, standing up and putting the kit away.

“You know what it was that happened?”

“I froze the water,” I said, “and the beaker shattered. It might have been from the water expanding so quickly, but I think I _might_ have displaced the heat from the water into the glass, and…”

“You can theorise about that later,” said Nightingale. “I would tell you to not try and reproduce the effect, but I doubt that my doing so would make much of a difference…?”

I put on my best blank expression, and Nightingale sighed. “I thought as much. Clear up in here, then, and meet me in the entrance hall. Dr Walid has something he’d like us to take a look at.”

Reluctantly, I bent to fetch the dustpan and brush from under the sink. Business as usual, then.  



End file.
